Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

by Bryan Allen Fierro

I’m worried that I’ll drop off this box and someone will get my license plate, find out the box is full of shit, and then I’ll get a ticket. The sign on the Dumpster reads, Private Use Only—Violators Will Be Prosecuted to the Fullest Extent of the Law. That seems extreme.

  “No one gives a shit, Chris.”

  I don’t state the obvious. “Let me drive farther down the alley,” I say. And there is nothing but full Dumpster after full Dumpster after full Dumpster. “The Plaza del Mar behind Saint Thomas Aquinas has high walls. We can go there.”

  “We’re going to be late for the reception,” she says. “Can we please just go? You can take it tomorrow.”

  I reach through the cab window and pull at the straps, shake the box a little. I adjust my seat and pat Carmen’s leg. She jerks it away but then relaxes into the idea of starting the day over from right now. I turn down the rearview mirror as far as it will go to keep an eye on things in the back of the truck.

  “All right then, she’s coming with us.”

  Carmen’s parents divorced when she was girl, and that is the reason we are only going to the reception. She doesn’t believe in marriage—a dog and pony show she calls it. She even hates television shows that spend too much time on big wedding episodes. “We watch this shit to get away from reality, right?” she had asked me when Ross and Rachel got married on Friends. Ross had been married three times on the show, and each time I did my best to defend his position to Carmen. I told her that Ross was a man who boils with love. Truth is I felt some sort of kinship to his enduring, and incredibly pathetic, paleontologist character. Love was to Ross an unearthed fossil that he wanted to display in his heart. I knew how that felt, always arranging the smattering of light from burned-out stars in the part of my brain that held things the longest.

  Carmen’s father moved to New Mexico to work for his cousin repairing air conditioners. Carmen says his mistress moved there first to be with her own children, and he simply followed. A one-way ticket stamped out of Boyle Heights! Broken air-conditioning units were just a big check mark in the pros column. Carmen moved to Monterey Park to live with her mother, who had moved in with a sister and taken work as a seamstress for a bridal shop. This is where I first met her. She was an undeclared student at East Los Angeles College. A colleague of mine, David Bell, taught astronomy twice a week and told me about this hot Latina in his class who he wished he could get down with but knew that the teacher-student relations code suggested otherwise. “But you. It couldn’t stop you,” he had told me. The deal was I had to tell him everything. “I want to smell that chola on your fingers when you’re done,” he had said. It was discomforting to be sure.

  Currently, I am the director of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Education Program at Griffith Park Observatory. It is a good title but an inflated one, and one that is asterisked with a comfortable sense of mediocrity. You see, back when I was a graduate student, I harnessed more potential than any of my instructors had seen to date. In the end, I think I left them underwhelmed, doing just enough to get enough. No real big bangs as career trajectories go.

  I told David to offer extra credit points to any of his Intro to Astronomy students who came to the observatory to hear me lecture on dark matter and black holes, and more specifically, a hot Latina who may or may not want to catch a bite to eat afterward, late at The Hat. When I told David that all I did was look into her eyes as I explained all the unseen matter in the universe, and how it is only detectable by its gravitational effects on other bodies, that all I did was pause long enough afterward to allow for something uncomfortable to happen to everyone in the room except for the two of us, he slapped himself across the face, wondering why he didn’t just do the same.

  “You’re too close to your work,” I had told him while sorting through a stack of graded tests on his desk. “If you want, I can review with you how seldom the planets align.” And even though he has detailed every woman he has ever slept with to me, I have never once told him how Carmen’s sweet taste sits in my mouth for hours.

  We turn onto Evergreen, and there’s zero curb space from one end of the recreation center to the other. I find a spot in front of the service entrance at the far end of the block. Shy Girl’s mom lives across the street in a turquoise two-story split duplex. At least the bars on the windows are decorative, wrought iron with the family’s initial at its center, G for Gutiérrez. As for the rest of the house—it looks well cared for, but the age and no other real desire to make the place look spectacular shows.

  The car in the driveway is a 1965 Impala—one of the shining arrows in the Chevrolet quiver. Carmen tells me it is Lonny’s car. The groom. I want to ask her if she ever dated him, but I don’t want her to break out her file folder of past partners. It is lowered down to the ground and rests on a collection of small rubber pads that the groom must carry everywhere he goes. The paint job is pearlescent white with Emerald City green that trims out the whole car. It’s a clean ride, but the practicality of it all escapes me. The upholstery has a fuzziness that reminds me of my favorite childhood chair, a chaise that was always my grizzly in the middle of the living room. Lonny’s choice in wheels is exquisite, however. It’s as though Midas himself owed Lonny a great favor, and to pay him back, he simply walked around the car and touched each wheel before calling things square.

  Two girls squeal at one another and string white paper flowers along the side of Lonny’s car. One girl is dark haired with high pigtails and in a satin dress with an oversized bow at the back. The corners of her lips are stained orange and her face is red with the blood that screaming brings. The second girl looks sick. Like it has been her whole past and future. But it doesn’t stop her from keeping up. They coil each other with the flowers until they fall onto the grass and get yelled at in Spanish by a large woman sitting on the porch and wearing a wide-brimmed hat that presses against the two wedding guests at her sides. I help each girl up from the lawn and nod to the woman, but she has already looked away. Even the sick-looking girl has the strength to pull away from me. She is wearing tap shoes that cause a terrible scratching sound on the sidewalk gravel. She darts up the sloping lawn toward the house with a flower strand high in the air behind her, pulling a lost kite.

  Carmen is paralyzed on the sidewalk. I nudge her forward and her calves stiffen under her dress like rebar. She is an immoveable force right now. The only other time I remember her so unwavering was when I told her that the dogs had left sometime in the night, and that if she wanted to, we could drive around the neighborhood and look for them, that they are probably together digging up trash in an alley, that we’d find them in no time at all. But she insisted that these things happen. She tried to blame the universe, but I was having none of that talk.

  I estimate the crowd at fifty people, and not one has noticed the girl who has come the long eleven point two miles home. I sing quietly into her right ear. “What’s our safe word if things start going bad?” she asks.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

  She looks overhead at the electrical wires that stitch both sides of the street together. “Possum,” she says.

  I look up expecting to see one scurrying. “I don’t think I could use it in a sentence without it sounding suspect,” I say.

  “Something else then. Hurry.”

  “Mention the aurora borealis, and how we are planning to go to Alaska next year to see it for my work.”

  It’s not the best idea because if anyone asks me about the aurora borealis, I will be obligated to teach how ions dance on magnetic fields. The night sky is fucking crack cocaine to someone like me. She doesn’t say no, but before she can say anything, Shy Girl spots us tying the loose ends of social espionage. She is wearing a white, lacy, off-the-shoulder gown that cinches her waist before jutting out cylindrically around her very plump ass. And much like a fat man being called flaco, or a hairy man, pelon, Shy Girl is the loudest and most domineering personality in Boyle Heights. She screams into the house. The two girls run o
ut and jump off the top step of the porch with a pair of scissors. Everyone is looking now.

  Shy Girl’s makeup is a palette of questionable decisions. Her eyes are smoky, seem almost branded into her face and crowned with baby blue, permanently affixed like a forgotten neon sign in a bar window. I didn’t realize black had so many shades. The rose of her cheekbones is underscored with a fine decorative white line that separates her face into a true north and a deep south. I want to blend it in, or smear it, lick my fingertip and erase it completely from Shy Girl’s day. Her beauty is best described as durable. Her lips are a shade of red that NASA had to invent. The poor girl can barely stand in her stiletto wedding heels as she trips forward into my arms, clawing at Carmen for support. The large woman on the porch looks up at me, then away again. Up close, I can see that Shy Girl has no eyebrows except for what is drawn over her eyes.

  “I’m Chris,” I say. “I’m here with . . .” And for some reason, I cannot recall my girlfriend’s name. It is as though I am searching for her chola moniker in my head, that her friends don’t know her by Carmen, but maybe by something else, like Diabla or Peanut.

  “Letty!” Shy Girl screams, and hugs Carmen. Of course. It’s Letty, short for her middle name, Leticia. Shy Girl is quick to dismiss me, and it seems like it might just be the free pass I am looking for, a territorial E ticket of sorts that allows me to eat the food here but keep no permanent place at the table.

  Carmen is relieved to be welcomed so warmly. I’d go as far as to say that she is already a quarter full. They go back and forth, calling each other homegirl and commenting on how firm each looks, how Shy Girl couldn’t be happier with her tetas in this dress, and how that makeup must have taken the whole afternoon, how her tía does it professionally, for reals. Carmen is showing off her fingertips. She points to my truck and pretends to lift something heavy over her head. That’s when Shy Girl starts looking around the yard. She focuses on the heart-shaped piñata being tethered to the low-hanging telephone line by Lonny. He is much older than Shy Girl, in his forties and muscular. But his body moves slowly under its own weight. The sick-looking girl is scouring the yard just beneath the piñata. She picks up different lengths of sticks but decides on none of them. Lonny bends down to her and points to the garage. She licks her palm, smacks the top of his bald head and laughs before running away. Lonny eyeballs the space where she was standing like he is expecting to see traces of her ghost.

  “Lonny!” Shy Girl calls out. “Come meet my Letty girl.”

  Thank God. They didn’t date. The introductions go on for a while. Some of Lonny’s boys come over to say what’s up to the girl they have only heard about. Others grab Carmen from behind and spin her. She kisses a groomsman on the mouth by accident when he turns at the last second to catch her lips. Everyone laughs. Lonny watches me from the hood of his showboat car. Really, what am I going to do about it?

  I wonder if Carmen is sad she left here. You hear about all the bad things that happen in neighborhoods like this—and I am sure bad things do—but the layers of protection here are like the age-old rings of a great oak. I know Carmen better than anyone here could possibly ever know her, and I know that she would’ve been fine.

  A rail-thin woman wearing red jeans with a large hairbrush in her back pocket walks up to Carmen and Shy Girl and starts to argue about why this bitch, my Carmen, was invited. Her elbows are bony stingers out the back of her arms. Her chest is flat like a fourteen-year-old boy’s. If you lined up ten bitches in a room and told me to pick the one this woman was referring to, I’d never deduce the choices down to my Carmen, but this is the case as Shy Girl does her best to calm the woman. Shy Girl transitions to Spanish in a way that suggests the words she needs have not ever filled the mouth of someone who only speaks English. Carmen speaks some Spanish, and she is listening intently, springing backward at times. I don’t speak any Spanish. I suggested to Carmen on her last birthday that we take salsa and Spanish lessons together, that it would be us traveling along at the same speed. We didn’t do it.

  Lonny is backed away now across the street by the chain link fence that lines the recreation center. His foot is propped up and he is laughing with his groomsmen, letting his new wife handle the situation. A couple of the men whistle and dance. They throw signs with their hands, but I know that none of them are deaf. This goes on for some time until a bridesmaid—I am wondering if it is Crazy Silvia because I so badly want to meet a Crazy Silvia—pulls the rail-thin woman away and pushes her toward the backyard where the reception is starting to gain momentum. There are very old women sitting in lawn chairs in the driveway who don’t respond to any of the commotion. The arguing can’t be over. I don’t think those things ever really go away. Shy Girl stomps around to the back of the house. Carmen combs her fake nails through her hair. I listen for her to tell someone that we are planning on going to Alaska next year to see the aurora borealis, but she takes her shoes off instead and hands them to me.

  “Hey, baby,” I say, “isn’t there supposed to be dancing?” I step in front of her. “We can leave.”

  “Did you see all that?” she asks.

  “We can leave,” I say again.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s long time ago stuff, that’s all.”

  “You still glad we came?” I ask.

  Her yes is tentative. “Had to see my girl. Let’s eat and make the rounds. Then we can go, okay?”

  “Whatever you need to do.”

  Carmen takes her shoes back and holds on to my shoulder as she steps into them. I diffused a bomb, no doubt. The little girls are in the upstairs room above the garage, hanging a bedsheet in the window. “I’ll find you out back in just a bit,” I say to Carmen. “Just gonna go inside and use the baño.” When I ask her whose girls those are, she shrugs her shoulders and steps over a large crack in the driveway on her way to the backyard.

  No one who lives here is an astronomer. I know this because I am the only person fighting the urge to constantly look up. I focus better in that direction. Growing up, I had struggled with my father’s advice on how to keep my eye on the ball. I was the kid who watched the butterfly in the outfield and who was amazed at the times you could see the moon at high noon. He told me that if I paid close enough attention, I’d be able to see the seams on the ball right out of the pitcher’s hand, and how its particular spin would give way as to how the ball would eventually break across the plate. It was the single most undoable thing for me as a young baseball player, to focus while facing an eighty-mile-an-hour heater bearing down on me. If Carmen and I ever have a child, and I for some unknown reason decide to put him through the scourge of Little League, I will explain a successful at bat by taking out baseball’s technical impossibilities with the naked eye, and substitute the number-crunching that scientists use to accurately intercept and destroy high-velocity descending asteroids.

  If something vanishes into thin air, there is the good chance that all you have to do is look up, and that is precisely how I find the sick half of the two girls—dragging an armful of bedding down the hallway at the top of the stairs. She pushes the door closed in the far bedroom. The frame is water warped, and the door simply creeps back open. The alarm in my head is sounding, a warning as to how this might look to anyone who happens in on me. I can’t help myself but to go upstairs. The room is darkened, the setting sun burned out behind flannel sheets tightly pulled over the curtain rod and tucked into the corners of the sill. In the middle of the bedroom hangs a Care Bears bedsheet. It is looped through a wire hanger and attached to the ceiling fan. The print of rainbow and clover-chested cartoon bears is translucent, backlit by the on-again-off-again light from inside. I can see the silhouette of the sick girl under the sheet, holding a large flashlight that in her hands resembles a lighthouse perched on the high cliff of her bloated belly. This is all she does, on-again-off-again, until I step on something that requires very minimal pounds per square inch to crunch under my foot. She turns the light off and gulps
her breath back, then bursts out coughing like maybe she swallowed her own spit.

  “You okay in there?” I ask.

  There’s just silence. I step out of the room and look down the hall. No one has changed the music volume. The cadence in the multiple conversations is uninterrupted. I peek back in and the sick girl has pulled the sheet down from the ceiling fan.

  “I like your tent,” I say. I reattach the hanger. “It is the best tent I’ve seen in a long time.”

  “It’s not a tent,” a small voice from inside says. “It’s a fortress.”

  “Of course it is. I don’t know what I was thinking. I see now that this is obviously a fortress. Tents are much smaller.” The light turns back on under the Care Bear fortress. “Care Bears fan?”

  “I pulled them off my cousin’s bed,” she says in a way that says I should have known.

  “Where’s your cousin?”

  She shrugs and pushes out her bottom lip.

  “You don’t live here?” I ask.

  “Until my Uncle Lonny’s wedding’s over.”

  “Who are your parents?”

  “Silvia’s my mother,” she says. And I am excited to find out if it’s Crazy Silvia, but I don’t think I should ask. There are things that kids shouldn’t know about their parents at a young age.

  “They call my mom Crazy Silvia.”

  And it’s amazing how the universe works.

  She pokes her head out from under the sheet and turns the flashlight on under her chin, revealing the ghostly figure I imagined Lonny staring at off the side of the porch.

  “My name is Marlena.”

  Marlena dips back into her fortress.

  “Chris,” I say, and there is no response from inside. The flashlight resumes under the sheet.

  “You can come inside, if you want,” she says.

  “I’m sorry?” I pretend that I didn’t hear her because I’m not sure that this is a good idea. The inside of my belly is hot. “Requesting permission to enter,” I say.